With growing popularity of social networks, more and more systems look for sources of social information. Weighted social networks provide extra information, such as a weight of connection between people.
Connection weight calculations are currently based on emails, instant messaging, blogs, meetings, etc. Current systems use only basic knowledge about group activities, taking into account only the participation or absence fact. This approach has disadvantages because participation in the same meeting does not necessarily point to a strong connection between two parties.
For example, in a scenario when someone organizes a review session for three groups from different geographic locations, 20 minutes for each group, there is a strong connection between reviewers and each group, but a very weak connection between reviewed groups. Another example is when multiple topics are discussed during a review meeting and in each topic discussion there is limited subset of active speakers.
Additional rich information can be extracted from group activities such as meetings and conferences. Extracting social information from a meeting, based on participants' activity can improve the accuracy of the derived knowledge.